


Love Takes Time

by lurrel



Category: Angels in America - Kushner
Genre: Alcohol, Andrew Garfield - Freeform, Chromatic Yuletide, Drag Queens, Drugs, M/M, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28123695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: Five times Belize and Prior kiss, one time they mean it.
Relationships: Belize | Norman Arriaga/Prior Walter
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Love Takes Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherryvanilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryvanilla/gifts).



**act one.  
**The first night they meet, Prior thinks Belize is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen in his gay little life. He’s just another twink with fluffy hair serving drinks at Studio 54 -- Belize is resplendent in full drag, a tight black velvet dress and a small afro full of roses, glitter across her cheekbones. She grabs a glass of champagne from his tray and he just stares after her, her long legs and full lips and incredibly powerful eyeliner.

“That’s Belize,” his coworker yells at him over the blasting Donna Summer. “She’s great, right?”

Prior makes sure to keep her topped off. She tucks a dollar in his hot pants and he can feel himself blush, and when she moves closer he can tell she’s younger than he thought.

“You’re new, huh?” She has a finger under his chin. She might be taller than him without heels but with them Prior has to crane his neck back to look up.

“Is it obvious?” Prior laughs. “A catering buddy got me the gig. I’ve never worked anywhere quite so glamorous.” He says it like they’re old friends; he can’t help it.

“You fit right in. Plus, you know exactly how to butter a girl up.” Belize tips her newly-filled champagne flute to him in thanks. 

“I’m doing my best,” he says, smile coy in return.

On her way out, Belize makes sure to give him a quick kiss goodbye, slipping one more dollar in his pants. There’s a number scrawled there, and Prior carefully copies it into his address book, one last gift from his mother when he left for the city years ago.

**act two.**   
Belize is not expecting calls on a Tuesday evening -- he’s pulling three 12-more-like-14 hour shifts a week as a CNA and this is his first day off after a more-like-16-hours day. The schedule suits him fine; the other girls in the house work even stranger hours so he gets blissful solitude in the kitchen when he needs it. 

“This is Belize,” he says, not letting a hint of curiosity be found in his voice. 

“Hi? This Prior Walter, and I used to work at Studio 54? You slipped your number in my pants?” There’s a pause. “I hope you remember me.”

Belize needs a second -- it’s been a few months -- but he’s no floozy. He’d been a little insulted that he hadn’t gotten a call in the next couple days.

“Finally found the balls to call me?” 

“Wondering what I have to do to find a place to grab a drink where I don’t have to get spanked first.”

“The Mine Shaft not filling the Studio 54 shaped hole in your heart?”

“The Mine Shaft’s nothing but filling holes -- but can’t stand the leather. The chafing!” he says, drawl at maximum, and Belize can’t help but laugh.

“What are you doing tonight?” 

“I’m free as a bird.”

“Meet me by The Eagle at 9 tonight, we’ll take it from there.”

“Wait, I just told you I was over leather. I don’t even own my own harness.”

“There’s a diner across the street.”

Prior looks a little less starstruck at Belize in street clothes, which is only minorly disappointing. Prior’s not quite his type either -- but his smile is coy and charming just the same.

They do go out, but not to the Eagle, and end up inexplicably at a punk venue. The bartender at Hurrah is someone who Prior appears to know intimately, though, which means the drinks are free and keep coming. The DJ slides from X-Ray Spex into something a little slower and Belize can feel Prior’s mouth hot against his neck.

“You are drunk,” Belize says, because he is, even though that’s not the only thing holding him back. “I’m not sure if I want to spoil what I’m sure will be a magnificent friendship.”

He feels rather than sees Prior pout. “I’m not looking for a wedding ring,” he mumbles, g’s dropping with the alcohol in his system.

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

There’s a split second where Prior pulls back and looks at him with big doe eyes, and the frission between them is palpable, and then Prior darts off the dancefloor leaving Belize to follow in his panicked wake.

“I missed my chance, huh?” Prior asks from a bathroom stall, the door swinging on its hinges.

Belize hands him a glass of water, along with the bartender's well-wishes. “Like I said, a magnificent friendship.”

His hand is cool and comforting on Prior’s neck.

[ **intermission]**

“Are you telling me Belize could resist this tight little bum?” 

[laughs] “Well, at least that first night. And probably the next morning.”

“Yeah, but Prior is _persistent_ . He probably makes it his mission to hook up."

“So they spend, what, a year on the town flirting? And Prior hopefully gets over it.”

“Prior puts together a little drag act, surely, maybe feels more established now he’s been around for a few years.”

“Belize gets a new scene, joins a house, goes to balls.”

“They keep going out but now…” he trails off, then waves a hand. “You know, there’s friction there.”

“They both get more fully formed.”

“And then you know, one hot night, the right amount of alcohol.”

“They sort of fall into it, right? Falling asleep in each other’s beds, then kissing a little after a good night out when they don’t find anyone suitable.”

“One thing leads to another and a few years later there they are, intimate friends and never quite lovers.”

"Quelle tragédie!"

**act three.  
**Belize takes a dramatic pause before stating, definitively, “I’m getting out of the scene,” into the winter night, his breath punctuating his point in a billow of steam. He looks pristine, wig perfectly pressed and hairline set to kill. He knows he looks pristine because he always looks immaculate. Even if tonight immaculate apparently didn’t cut it.

He couldn’t begrudge the new girl’s win; who could help beginner’s luck?

The losers of the night’s ball are holding court on the deck of someone else’s fancy house, and Belize is drinking another mystery punch. Bowie is blasting from the kitchen, but ironically they’ve all done enough dancing for a while. 

Prior had designed the catwalk for the evening’s festivities and was currently trying to light something without setting his fingerless gloves on fire.

“Oh are you?” he mumbles around the cigarette.

“Smoking is bad for you,” he says, only half meaning it. 

“It’s a spliff,” Prior says through a mouthful of smoke. “It’s only half bad for me.”

“Then hand it over. Didn’t your mother teach you to share?” 

Prior takes a long drag and then crooks a long finger, a clear invitation he’d seen plenty of times before, but not directed at himself. The smile on his face is full of impish delight. 

Belize leans down to meet his mouth. It tastes familiar and green, somehow always a slight surprise.

There’s a whistle from one of the other queens on the porch.

Prior laughs and flips them off. Belize settles against the wooden railing and looks up at the night sky -- just the same handful of stars you can see in the city.

“You want to leave this all behind?” Prior asks, waving at the withered patch of grass that passed for a backyard in the neighborhood. It’s more than he has for his little patch of the city but that doesn’t mean he covets it.

Belize takes the spliff from his fingers with a pinch of his fake nails. 

“Why be a nurse’s aide, when I can be a registered nurse?” He’d been wondering for a while. Looks fade, opportunities shrivel up, and the gigs felt longer and more tiring. He didn’t love the feeling of time passing but everything kept changing -- except for Prior.

Prior, who gasps, a hand flung over his heart. “School? In your advanced age?”

“A little bird told me that my current hospital will reimburse nursing school so long as I’m still full time.”

“Don’t let one loss take you out of the game.”

“Do you really think I’m that vain?” Belize makes sure to bat his falsies as hard as possible.

Prior at least looks apologetic when he says, “Maybe a little. But nursing school isn’t the worst idea.”

“Better hours, more respect,” he says, and then he rubs his fingers together, “certainly more scratch. Not that you would know, trust fund baby.”

“I still have to sing for my supper,” he says, leaning his head against Belize’s shoulder. “But you’re right, the good times can’t last forever.”

“I want something stable in my life, you know?”

“Oooh, I see what this is about,” Prior says with a laugh. “Did you finally kick Antonio out?”

“A nursing degree will never stand me up for dinner or sleep with at least two of my nemeses.”

Prior’s gasp is real this time. “Again? A different one?”

Belize, who would admit that he was fueled at least 30% by righteous anger on a good day, feels his blood heat up. “Again! It was Candy, that slag.”

“She’s tacky and a sore loser.” Prior takes one last inhale and goes for the kiss himself, shotgunning more sweet smoke into his mouth. 

This, this was peaceful. He watches Prior hand off the spliff and feels a few muscles unclench. 

“When are you going to grow up and find a real job yourself?”

“Mon chéri, I do not dream of labor. I _am_ trying to convince a broker to help me play the market, but no one wants to take on the liability of a poor little faggot.” Prior rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, an absurd pout on his face.

Belize pats his arm. “I’m sure you’ll find one you can seduce eventually.”

“You know just what sweet things to say to me,” Prior says, but he’s watching the smoke curl from his lips, and Belize knows his eyes are heavy-lidded from the weed but it’s nice, sometimes, to have someone appreciate your own finer things.

“Wait, am I selling out? This isn't selling out, is it?”

“I don’t think wanting a more stable job is assimilation. You’re not getting married or moving to the suburbs.”

They both take a moment to shudder, and Belize spits over the railing. 

“Heaven forfend.” 

“Besides, haven’t you been talking for ages about the gender politics of drag being a _drag,_ _baby?”_

“That _is_ a very good spin on it,” Belize says. “But promise me you won’t let me get boring.”

Prior laughs and Belize watches the glittery bob of his throat. “Tu ne pourrais jamais! Never!”  
  


**act four.  
** Louis used to get jealous when at the end of the night, Belize would swoop Prior into his arms and kiss him on the mouth. The cheeks, fine, they did love to be _European_ at one another, but the mouth?

“Oh, that,” Belize said when Louis finally asked, a sardonic smile across his face. He was wearing a bright purple lipstick that was now smeared on the side of Prior’s mouth. Prior was hugging another friend; the foyer was in fact crowded with people trying their best to go home but caught in the orbit of one last conversation. 

“We go back a long time, sweetheart.” Belize patted Louis on the shoulder on his way out.

It’s true -- Prior told him about Belize’s time in nursing school, how stressful it was and how that’s the whole reason Prior learned to cook in the first place. They cohabited, even. They had an inscrutable history and it had always gnawed at him. 

“You never kissed me on the lips before we were dating,” he said on the subway, and Prior laughed, cheeks flushed with the heat and the cheap champagne.

“Are you jealous?” Prior asked. Louis liked it when they fought because Prior never acted like he didn’t get what Louis was angry about. Sometimes he knew before Louis even did. Prior would prefer the bush come right out and say it -- Louis was the type to need at least one beating.

The last big party he goes to with Prior, before the end of the world, is a sweaty mess in August. He’s not sure whose house they’re in, and he argues with a straight guy over beer in the kitchen because he’s never considered himself much of a dancer. 

At the end of the night, he asks Belize for a kiss, too. Prior laughs but Belize doesn’t. “I don’t think I like you enough yet,” he says, arch enough for plausible deniability. It stings like the truth.

Prior leans over and their lips touch. It is, Louis has to admit, extremely beautiful, like two of Warhol’s newest queens -- Belize’s blue lips, the streak of silver over Prior’s eyes, the haze of night’s heat blurring them. The streetlights catch the glitter in their hair.

**act five.  
**Belize has a lot of things to worry about. His abuela, and the payment on her nursing home. His boyfriend, who does not like that he’s grabbed an extra shift and who didn’t want to listen to any complicated feelings, about Roy Cohn or otherwise. The virus ravaging his friends and what it might take to save them. 

So it feels like a lifted weight when Prior returns to the world, a warm relief at the end of an inhospitable bitch of a winter. 

Later, before Prior is discharged, he tells the tale of how exactly he came home.

At the end, he’s not sure what to make of it. Still, it’s in character.

“So you turned down the universe?”

“I turned down the universe.” Prior laughs like no one has ever told him to hush, child, cállate, and it’s still like a peal of an enormous bell.

“No voices since?”

“It’s back to just being me up here,” he says, rapping the side of his head with his knuckles. A few days ago that would have exhausted him.

“Not even the ancestors?” 

“I’ve thrown off my manifest destiny,” Prior with a great breath of air. 

“Congrats, mon ange,” Belize says, and Prior leans hard out of his bed, lips pursed and eyelashes fluttering. Belize obliges, the kiss chaste and dry, and their hands clasp together. 

He leaves Prior tucked in and takes the train to the hospital where he’s actually employed

There are things and places that ground him: the particular smell of a censer’s incense, the bite of wind between two skyscrapers, the squeeze of Prior’s hands, getting stronger every day.

[ **bonus scene** ]

_Louis and Belize are meeting for lunch again, because Louis needs friends and Belize is a charitable person. They sit on a bench. Their bench._

**Louis:** So, I haven’t seen you around with what’s-his-face lately.

_Belize doesn’t dignify this with a response._

**Louis:** Okay, well. People tell me things and I hear you haven’t been around with what’s-his-face. 

**Belize:** You’d know his name if you ever bothered to come around anymore. Prior already told you he doesn’t mind. 

**Louis:** I’m trying to be considerate of his feelings. 

**Belize:** He’s moving on, now that he’s done with physical therapy. He told me, if he wants to fuck a Mormon, let him fuck a Mormon. I just want him to be happy!

 **Louis, frustrated:** Yeah, prophethood has turned him into a real mensch. You know, I wish you wouldn’t encourage him.

_Belize realises that up to that point, it had been light teasing, but now he felt defensive on his friend’s behalf._

**Belize:** Somebody should be encouraging, and I don’t really hear much pep from you.

 **Louis:** Well, I’m the ex! Besides, tigers can’t change their stripes.

 **Belize:** And old dogs can’t learn new tricks. Got any other canards?

 **Louis:** Well I’m certainly not going to try to teach Prior anything. And I think you could probably learn to be a little nicer.

 _Belize scoffs._

**Belize:** I am being nice. This is me being nice. 

**act six.  
** Prior had taken walking around the city for granted in his previous life, before he knew he was a particularly important cog in the machine of the universe. New York City, in his opinion, had _too_ much walking. Where he was from, people were civilized and drove everywhere. But that hadn’t been home for a long time; it didn’t have any of the things he needed to survive like New York did.

Belize, for one. They were walking together as was their new custom ever since Prior finally, finally agreed to buy a cane. He’d spent more months than he would like to admit for him to finally accept that the limp wasn’t going to go away, no matter how much physical therapy he did. 

The walks have gotten easier, years of work for marginal ease but the difference was there. The differences were everywhere, post-AZT. The glasses, the cane, sitting more than dancing -- but he still makes sure to go dancing. He feels tired even when he feels invigorated, sometimes.

The cane is a constant now, a steadying presence in his hand.

Knowing the importance of moving forward, and actually moving forward, turned out to be two very different challenges. There were no angels here to push him, no destiny to rail against. Just each day folding into the next, progress incremental no matter how hard he worked.

“It’s a nice day,” Belize says, because he’s good at change but better at ignoring it. It’s not too hot, a nice spring breeze blowing. The park they’re in is blooming, making Prior sneeze every so often. The give and take of the city’s seasons.

“Do you think real change is possible?” Prior asks. “I have to say I don’t know if I have the convictions I once did.”

“Have you been speaking to a little bird?” Belize asks, cutting thru the bullshit. He gives Prior a slanted look. A knowing gaze, even.

“I think I’m ready for a change.” It comes out almost like a question, but he knows the answer.

Belize leans in first, catches his mouth first, caught his eye that first time. He lingers and then presses forward, slowly opening their mouths together. Prior’s is soft and exploratory and Belize’s is firm. Kissing is as familiar and steady and each others' heartbeats.

“Mon ange.”

“Ma cherie bichette.” The glasses are new, the coy smile isn’t. 

**act seven.**

[ _The backstage of Neil Simon Theatre, week 4_ ]

Nathan is sitting in Andrew’s dressing room, carefully rolling a joint, and he looks up and grins when Andrew finally steps in. 

“A little something to take the edge off before you talk to your adoring public.”

“They’re _your_ adoring public as well,” Andrew says. 

Nathan can feel Andrew watching his hands in their amiable silence. This is new -- at the beginning of the National Theatre production they would talk themselves hoarse about every single detail. Now they try to take time to breathe first, let the last act reverberate through them, even though Nathan finds a new detail every single night.

He twists the end of the joint off and watches Andrew put it in his mouth; he flicks his lighter and watches Andrew’s eyes close as he inhales. 

This is new -- it’s slow when Andrew presses his mouth against his own, and Nathan is slow to inhale what’s offered. Languid. Andrew passes him the joint and they do this again, mouths and breaths hot and mingled. 

“Have you come up with any more scenes of our--their--future? We’ve plotted them all the way to 1991 now.”

Nathan shrugs and lets Andrew watch his own lips, his lashes as he flutters them and smiles. He reaches for Andrew’s hand and traces his lifeline -- his fingers are long and twitch when he does. “We should let them rest for a while and write something new.”  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Title from the 1990 Mariah Carey song.


End file.
